Canadian Government Expenses

Getting Tough on Government Expenses

See what MacLeans magazine has said about this project:

For now, while everyone else is getting excited about the Twitter and the blogs (and maybe someday a new TV network featuring that guy who’s already on radio and that other guy who likes to shout about stuff), punditsguide.ca, threehundredeight.com, openparliament.ca, howdtheyvote.ca, disclosed.ca and governmentexpenses.ca could be the six most important (and, in a way, exciting) contributions to the political process, and the coverage and scrutiny of same, to appear in recent years.

But any discussion of Butler-Jones’s travel expenses should delve much deeper than the 2009 flu scare. The previous year, he topped $192,000, and since he took up his post in late 2004, his myriad journeys have cost taxpayers just over $1 million—which makes him the grand champion of travel and hospitality spending in the federal government, at least among the cabinet ministers and elite bureaucrats who are required to reveal their claims on their departmental websites. How do we know? Because an unknown computer wizard in Nova Scotia named Drew McPherson has invented software that scans the stew of expense filings on so-called “proactive disclosure” pages of departmental websites, tabulating, ranking and generally making sense of what was hitherto a useless mélange of unrelated, uncollated and untotalled data.

When collated and tabulated on McPherson’s website, governmentexpenses.ca, the data puts a lot into perspective. Back in 2006, federal officials had assured Maclean’s that a planned travel booking portal, including an online booking tool, would halt the runaway train of government travel costs. McPherson’s updated stats show spending by ministers and senior bureaucrats actually increased in each of the following two years, to nearly $30 million.

That said, Libbey isn’t disputing the results as laid out by McPherson’s website. “I had my people take a look at it on a sample basis and I think his reports are factually accurate,” he says. “We might as well work with them.” That it took an unknown computer whiz from the Maritimes to bring us to this point speaks to the government’s reluctance to face up to the truth, says Derek Fildebrandt, research director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “Accessibility of this sort of information was terrible when I began doing this a year and a half ago,” he says, “and it’s only got worse since.” As for McPherson, he’s hoping his attempt to “do a bit of public good” opens a window onto a world where economic laws that apply to the rest of us seem to hang suspended. An experimental vaccine, you might say, against a spending pandemic.

Disclosed.ca compiles information on government contracts, while governmentexpenses.ca aims to do the same for the expenses of public officials.

To test that hypothesis, we asked Drew McPherson, a Nova Scotia-based computer whiz who keeps tabs on government expenses, to calculate how much four randomly selected ministers’ offices had spent on international in fiscal year 2009-2010.

In his analysis, McPherson picked the offices of the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Minister of National Revenue, Minister of State (Agriculture), and Minister of Health.

Look at these results!

Largest Spending Cutbacks from 2009 to 2010